Soviet General Scheme of Settlement (Generalnaya skhema rasseleniya)

Core idea

Union-wide blueprint organising a hierarchical 'unified settlement system' across the USSR

Why it matters

The defining socialist supra-regional settlement doctrine, aimed at regulating city growth and town-country differences

Description

Issued in 1975 and revised in 1982, the General Scheme of Settlement was a union-wide framework guiding the development of the Soviet settlement system. It expressed the doctrine of the 'unified settlement system' associated with planners such as Boris Khorev: an interrelated, deliberately regulated network of places organised in a multi-tier hierarchy of centres and dependent settlements. The scheme sought to restrain the growth of the largest cities, develop medium and small towns, and structure each region around graded inter-settlement infrastructure, with the explicit aim of reducing differences between town and countryside and providing roughly equivalent living and working conditions across the country.

Significance

The General Scheme of Settlement was the most comprehensive socialist attempt to plan a national settlement system as a single coordinated whole. It embodied the unified-settlement-system theory in official policy, linking ideology — overcoming the town-country divide — to spatial doctrine, and stands as the defining supra-regional settlement framework of the Soviet planned economy, influential across the Eastern Bloc.

What shaped it

• Communism and the USSR (1917 / 1922)
• Ekistics (1968)
• The master plan (early 20th c.)
• Cybernetics & systems theory (1948 onward)

Sources

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12269003/
• https://andrewbatson.com/2017/07/26/how-the-soviet-union-tried-to-control-the-growth-of-large-ci